Two Years After Katrina, Still Struggling With Healthcare
By Amy Zganjar | August 30, 2007
I've just returned from New Orleans where I visited Share Our Strength's partners and friends to see firsthand the progress and challenges that the city faces two years after Hurricane Katrina.
Having been to the city in February I didn't expect to see much change, but despite the fact that questions about the levees still remain, and that we’re right in the middle of another hurricane season, and that the sign over City Hall is still missing its C, people are returning, and the streets are a little busier and cleaner.
We spent the majority of our time visiting the various medical clinics around town and trying to learn more about local Healthy Start and WIC programs in an effort to tie relief and recovery efforts more closely to our goal of reaching children with a steady diet of nutritious food. It was fitting that Friday morning's Times Picayune headline described the city's continued struggle to serve the medical needs of its residents without sufficient medical care. Charity hospital sits empty as do most of the city's medical clinics, doctor's offices and hospitals. The charity system has been unofficially replaced by a loose collection of free or sliding scale medical clinics in neighborhoods across the city, run by locals responding to need or by outside aid agencies. We visited several including the free 9th Ward Clinic, a Mom and Baby mobile unit that sees 80 mostly illegal Latino new or expecting moms (a new population of uninsured mothers resulting from the influx of illegal Honduran workers), and in New Orleans East, a free medical clinic/pharmacy run by Operation Blessing and International Medical Alliance.
At Operation Blessing, we found a standing room only waiting room with a line stretching outside into the 104 degree heat. We later learned that people line up before the sun's up some days to increase their chances of being seen. Operation Blessing is a faith-based non-profit organization, and International Medical Alliance is a secular emergency medical organization that focuses primarily in third world countries. The two agencies have partnered because Operation Blessing, impressed by the work that IMA had done in Mississippi after the storm, recruited them to New Orleans for an indefinite length of time. Operation Blessing funds the operation, pharmacy and all (the pharmacy costs are averaging $220,000 per month). We talked with one half of IMA's husband-wife doctor team, Dorothy Davison, in between her consults with the nurses and doctors seeing patients at the clinic. Dorothy and her husband, Dr. Dale Betterton, oversee the clinic that treats about 100 patients daily, both walk-ins and appointments. The clinic is set up to help patients with minor acute problems, and as Dorothy explained, the majority of their patients suffer from chronic diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma and secondary problems like Glaucoma. All but four of the clinic's staff are working without pay, and once a month, doctors from Mayo Clinic join the team. Dorothy and Dale are exhausted from the pace and worried about their project in Kenya -- a program that treats intestinal parasites in rural villages in an attempt to eradicate lymphatic filariasis, because the critical time period for mass medicine distribution is quickly approaching. But they are hesitant to leave until they are sure about the New Orleans clinic's future.
As Dorothy spoke, I thought about the disparate needs of the two very different communities they serve. I wondered, and asked, how they make the choice -- Kenya or New Orleans? Dorothy explained that the need is relative -- that the Kenyan villagers do not know what they don't have, and that impacts their outlook on life and their sense of optimism and hope for the future. "In New Orleans," she explained, "you have people who did everything right... had a job, a retirement plan, worked hard, bought a house, and now everything is gone. Retirement systems are bankrupt, houses destroyed, jobs gone and insurance non-existent." The loss is devastating. There is no help in site and as a result, there is little hope, save the small moments of grace from clinics like this -- a chance to see a free dentist or receive a month's supply of high blood pressure medication. I remembered having similar conversations in Pass Christian with the Children's Health Fund docs in the months after the storm. I hoped, but didn't hold out faith, that the systems would be in place two years later. They are not. The majority of the folks visiting clinics like this are underemployed, underserved, underinsured, undereducated, and were that way long before Katrina. We can't rebuild the medical sytem anymore than we can rebuild the school system. But there are ways that we can help, which I'll write more about in another post.